System on Chip (SoC) is a concept that strives to integrate more and more functionality into a given device. This integration can take the form of either hardware or solution software. Performance gains are traditionally achieved by increased clock rates and more advanced process nodes. Many SoC designs pair a digital signal processor (DSP) with a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) processor to target specific applications. A more recent approach to increasing performance has been to create multi-core devices.
Complex SoCs require a scalable and convenient method of connecting a variety of peripheral blocks such as processors, accelerators, shared memory and IO devices while addressing the power, performance and cost requirements of the end application. Due to the complexity and high performance requirements of these devices, the chip interconnect tends to be hierarchical and partitioned depending on the latency tolerance and bandwidth requirements of the endpoints. The connectivity among the endpoints tends to be more flexible to allow for future devices that may be derived from a current device. In this scenario, a management protocol used in a flexible interconnect may include overhead information to control routing of packets through an interconnect fabric.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.